Sunday, June 9, 2013

Pakatan would've won under proportional system

Pakatan
Rakyat would have won the 13th general election with a total of 114
parliamentary seats out of 222 if Malaysia uses the proportional voting
system, according to political scientist Wong Chin Huat.

Presenting
this view at a Bar Council forum today, he said the mixed-member
proportional voting system allows almost perfect correlation between
popular vote and seats.

To illustrate his point, Wong produced a
simulation of the how the general election outcome would have been under
a similar system - the party list-proportional representation
(list-PR).

Wong
(left) said that assuming that voters had voted for the same party
under the list-PR, PAS would have taken 33 seats, PKR, 46 and the DAP,
35, pushing the total number ahead of the BN's 106.

Star and Sarawak Workers Party would have also won a seat each.

"Even
if west and east Malaysia are made two constituencies, with the same
formula, Pakatan will still win 110, the BN 109, Star 2 and SWP 1," he
said.
In the list-PR, parties make lists of candidates to be
elected, and seats get allocated to each party in proportion to the
number of votes the party receives. The MPs taking up the seats are
selected by the party.

Instead, he said, Malaysia uses the
first-past-the-post system which even if constituencies are perfectly
apportioned, allows a party or coalition to claim victory with only
slightly more than 25 percent popular votes.

"To win, you have to
get a little more than half of the seats, and to win each seat you have
to win a little more than half of the votes there," he explained.
In
a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system, a voter has two votes, one
for the constituency representation and another for the party.

A parliament in the MMP system consists of the half constituency MPs and half party-list MPs.

It is used in several countries, including Germany, and involves a more
complicated method of determining which candidate will represent each
constituency in an assembly.

This system was first used in
Germany and later also adopted by New Zealand in 1994. New Zealand first
used the 'first past the post' system like Malaysia.Disparity between east and west
Wong,
who is also part of electoral reform group Bersih, said that even if
Malaysia remains on the first-past-the-post system, it is possible to
put in measures to limit fraud.

Among them are to limit
intra-state malapportionment and to seek judicial reviews of
constituencies which are disproportionately bigger than others.

He
also urged negotiation with East Malaysian states in order to minimise
disparity between constituencies between the east and the west.

"With one sixth of the electorate, East Malaysia controls 25 percent of parliamentary seats.

"They
say it's a legacy issue and that they will not give that away until
they can ensure a better deal so the states won't be more marginalised
than now.

"But any right-thinking East Malaysian can see that the
system is not working now, even if they still have this to threaten
Kuala Lumpur," he said.

According to the agreement for the
formation of Malaysia in 1963, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore should have a
total 34 percent of parliamentary seats.